I was taking a more general application of "what's the point?" The first connection to what would become the Internet was made between UCLA and SRI in Menlo Park, CA after all. That was a big deal for them, but a bigger deal for us. What the point of that was is rather subjective.
100PB seems like a lot of data today - 3,000 times the 3TB storage available in a standard PC. But I am so old I wear an onion on my belt, as was the fashion in my day. 1/3000th of that 3TB is 1GB. I can remember when to have 1GB of storage in your PC was an undreamt of wealth of storage richness: a bottomless well that might never be filled. Hell, I can remember a day when 3TB of digital info storage was more storage than there was - everywhere on Earth. In fact in my early days there was talk of a terabyte being the sum of human knowledge (silly, I know). It's reasonable to expect that when that much more time has passed again, 100PB will not be a big deal either.
So now we carry around a 1TB 2.5" USB drive in our shirt pocket like it's no big deal. And when guys like this do things like this we talk about what it means to them - and that's fine. But there is a larger story, like there was a larger story at UCLA - and that is "what does this mean to the rest of us?"
Now 339Gbps isn't such a big deal. NEC wizards have already passed 101 Tbps - 300 times as much over a single fiber [wikipedia.org], though not to this distance. That's enough bandwidth to pass your 100PB in 20 minutes, over a single strand of glass fiber.
The LA Metro area is about 15 million people, or 3 million homes. To deliver 1Gbps to a reasonable half of 3 million homes and mesh it out for global distribution is going to require a lot of these links. The aggregate demand would probably be under 1% of peak potential of 3,000 Tbps or about 30Tbps. 100 times the bandwidth of this link. Using CDNs(*) - particularly for YouTube, CableTV, the usual porn suspects and BitTorrent you could diminish the need for wider bandwidth considerably but you still need a wide pipe to the outside world. And all the Internet servers in the world would need to be updated to support the crushing demand with higher performance, SSD storage and the like. And that's great for the economy, and it's just LA.
These innovations are neat, but they're neater still when they come home to all of us.
TL;DR: Get off my lawn.
/(*) Define CDN: A CDN, or Content Delivery Network [wikipedia.org] is a facility for moving high bandwidth, high demand or high transaction content closer to a nexus of consumers. An example would be Netflix, which delivers streaming video content to 21 million subscribers, comprising by some estimates a full third of Internet traffic. Netflix provides for free to Internet providers BackBlaze boxes [gigaom.com] that move Netflix content closer to the end user, reducing backbone usage. Similar boxes are provided by advertising networks and other content providers.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/nP9AkQM6VI0/story01.htm
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